What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Encountering representations of the Holocaust
by writers and filmmakers that shape and reshape
public perceptions and, moreover, the uncritical use
of feature films like these in education’.
The film of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
currently occupies a central place in young people’s
encounters with the Holocaust. Our survey
questionnaire showed that over 80 per cent of
students who had watched a film or TV programme
about the Holocaust had seen this, and this is
supported by smaller-scale research (Gray 2014a,
2014b). As such it represents the continuation of
a pattern by which, approximately every 20 years,
a new mainstream representation of the Holocaust
claims public attention. In the 1970s this was the
NBC miniseries Holocaust, in the 1990s, Schindler’s
List, and in the 2010s – at least for teenagers – it
is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The evidence
from our focus groups suggest that this is having a
significant, and significantly problematic impact on
the way young people attempt to make sense of
this complex past.
What do students think and feel
about encountering atrocity images
of the Holocaust?
The value and appropriateness of using atrocity
images in classroom teaching about the Holocaust
has been called into question by many in the field,
including the International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance (IHRA). Its guidelines state that the Holocaust
can be taught effectively without using photographs
of corpses, human suffering and shootings, and warn
of the potential harm in the use of such images with
young people (IHRA n.d.).
There are three main reasons given in the
guidelines for avoiding the overuse of Holocaust
atrocity imagery. First, they might precipitate or
reinforce a defining view of Jewish people as victims
without agency, with the risk highest in classrooms
where these types of images are the primary or
only visual representation of Jewish people that
students are exposed to. We know from the Centre’s
research with teachers (Pettigrew et al. 2009) that
attention given by schools to Jewish life before
the Holocaust, and Jewish responses during and
after the Holocaust, is limited. The concern is that,
if young people only see Jews within a paradigm
of victimhood, this might lead to a dangerous
misconstruction that the Holocaust was in some
way part of an inevitable pattern.
Second, Holocaust images have the potential
to shock, disturb or traumatise young people who
have little say about the materials that are brought
to lessons by their teachers. Marianne Hirsch (2001)
uses the notion of ‘rupture’ to describe what can
happen when a child encounters Holocaust imagery.
The child, she writes, is confronted with shock and
‘a sense that the world will never again be whole;
that something broke’. This rupture may in turn
impede learning rather than enhance it.
The third reason relates to how far respect for the
dignity and memory of the individuals depicted in the
photographs can be assured when they are used as
resource material in classrooms.
And yet, while these debates continue, the
ubiquity of Holocaust atrocity images can be
confirmed by any internet search and they have
become a staple part of Holocaust representation
in British textbooks (Foster and Burgess 2013) and
popular documentaries. They are also an important
part of this history; the harrowing photographs taken
of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, for example,
served not only to record but also to define the
horror of mass-produced death (Sontag 2003).
The challenge for the IHRA’s guidelines on more
limited use of Holcoaust images in classrooms is
that they are ‘out there’, and young people will be
exposed to them whether or not they are brought
to the classroom.
Focus-group interviews were conducted in order
to gain insight into what educational value, if any,
young people attribute to atrocity images of the
Holocaust and how they respond to some of the
criticisms that are made of their use, often on their
behalf. In these interviews, young people were in the
main resolute that graphic images of the Holocaust
have an important place in their learning. Only one
student reported that he felt uncomfortable viewing
such images and said it was unnecessary in the
learning process:
It’s enough to tell people what happened, just so
long as … I don’t know; obviously you want to catch
the students’ attention so they’re paying attention
to what they’re learning, but I don’t think it’s quite
so necessary to show them the images. I personally
could learn without the images (Milo, Year 13, SE2).
All other respondents saw graphic images
as useful learning tools. Accepting that they are
inherently disturbing, the images were not seen
as the cause of unreasonable or inappropriate
psychological discomfort given the horrific nature
of the past reality that students were attempting
to understand. Some students felt that being
disturbed by what they encountered in class was
not necessarily a negative response but rather, in the
case of the Holocaust, a necessary one:
I think it’s important to be upset about these things
and if you’re not upset, you’re not having empathy,
for the subject, and I think people should be upset
about it, because then, you know what these people